DevOpsDays Berlin 2014

Attending a conference in your hometown is just great as you have a short way home. DevOpsDays in Berlin meant two days of really good talks and Open Space Sessions. A very well organized event with excellent catering and an awesome evening event. Long story short here are some impressions I took home:

DevOps arrived at big scale. Nearly everybody is talking about it and wants to implement the right way. Especially larger companies started their own “DevOps experiments” mostly as a side road next to traditional development and IT operation departments. This is surely not an easy task to do. Some stories have been told over and over again. Bottom line: “DevOps” is not a technical problem in the first place - its an approach that needs a strong commitment on the management level of an organization. In a way it reminds me on the introduction of agile software development a couple of years back.

Good DevOps engineers are like fairy dust. They are hard to find and most wanted. Ok, this actually holds true for every good IT engineer, however job offers have been all over the place.

Docker: everybody is talking about it but nobody is actually doing it. Wait: there are some exceptions! I really enjoyed the session with Simon Eskildsen. He demonstrated how Shopify uses Docker in production. However he made clear, that there are currently no best practices on how to do this. I totally agree with the "starting small and find out what is working best for you" approach. Based on the experiences we made with Docker in our own projects I’m pretty sure it will make it’s way eventually. It's a bet on the future.

I really enjoyed the last two days and met a lot of interesting people. Looking forward to see you on one of the next meetups.